August 27, 2003

But before I go...

I agree wholeheartedly with Rachel Lucas. I am absolutely appalled that the media has no plans to commemorate September 11, and I also ask: What the hell is WRONG with people? Every year the death of Princess Diana is commemorated with TV shows, for God's sake ...

God FORBID that Americans should feel "angry". Poor little Americans needed to be shielded from their more passionate emotions, because maybe we can't handle it! And anger is BAD, right? Anger is just pain coming outward, right?

Uh ... No. Sometimes anger is just plain old anger. Because sometimes anger is justified. A cigar is sometimes just a cigar, hate to tell you.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, death-guru, identified "anger" as one of the necessary stages of grief. Gimme a break: we have the RIGHT to be angry. Not perpetually, not forever ... but we should be allowed a moment to remember what happened that day, to have our society, our American society, take a moment, take a breath, and remember. Together.

We are told to give a shit about Laci Peterson and Kobe Bryant. We are bombarded with media onslaughts about those meaningless (except to the people involved) spectacles.

Michele has started up her fantastic project again, to commemorate September 11. Go over and visit her site, follow all her links, post something. It's important.

September 11 should be commemorated. To not do so is a grave mistake.

Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, among other things, has as one of his eternal themes, the importance of memory. (One of his books is called The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.) Having lived under Communist rule, having gone through the brief ecstatic awakening of the Prague Spring, before darkness descended once again, he is all too familiar with what happens when a people, as a whole, are deprived of their memory. When the STATE decides what is appropriate for people to remember.

It's like any country which goes thru some violent revolution, and suddenly all the street names have to be changed, all the books have to be re-edited ... Stalin consistently had to doctor photos, cutting this or that person out, depending on who was "in" and who was "out" ...

Reality/Truth then becomes a property of the state, and therefore, so does memory.

It is not up to the stupid MEDIA what we remember, what we hold in our hearts and minds. We do not have to be told how to feel. We do not have to be shielded from ourselves.

We WILL remember. We will never forget. We will allow ourselves to be angry, to grieve, to talk, to share stories. They will not keep September 11 from us, because it is OURS.

Our ethnocentric society insists that we not be like other parts of the world (terror on a daily basis) - so we must focus on Laci and Kobe and not on the outside evil that has broken in upon our sacred land. To remember the event, in my opinion, is to honor all of those amazing lives...

Of course we have a right to feel angry, we have a damned good reason to. I saw the aftermath with my own eyes, and I've seen the giant hole in the ground where two majestic skyscrapers once stood. I'll be angry until everyone who helped it happen are rotting in the ground.

Media be damned..Americans will remember that terrible day whether it's media-correct or not. Too much changed in all of our lives forever, too much is yet to be done in memory of all who perished, too much is at stake not to remember...

It's not in the interest of the leftwing media to remind people about 9/11 as if anyone could ever forget.

Liberals want people to have bread and circuses, so they won't be bored and maybe figure out what they're up to. OJ, Princess Di, Lacy, etc. will keep them entertained. Television programming completes the picture.

The day will come when all Islam will curse the day that one of their own showed the villany they are capable of to the rest of the world. All thinking persons are suspicious of theocratic, mindless actions in the name of "allah". If they thought it couldn't be worse they were wrong!

The networks won't do any real reminders on 9/11/03 because they are afraid to. They fear Americans remembering that we are engaged in a war for our national and cultural survival. They fear Americans realizing that many in the mainstream media are actually on the other side in this war.